According to Mystik Boucher, although there's nothing directly from WSE who are merely "closed for an upgrade," WSE was hacked for L$3.2 Million, probably by her estwhile friend and colleague Thurston (Hallard) who has since been permanently banned from SL (presumably for this act).I interviewed Mystik to find out her take on it. She said, in her interview, that "My impression is they just lack in the security department. Any system with those kinds of funds should not take security lightly. Easy [to defaud], yes." and "That's a professional opinion -- coming from over 12years of Unix/Security background. To top it off, LukeConnell had given Thurston MOD rights to WSE Huet -- The money account for WSE. Ignorance or [bad] security. One or the other."
Mystik herself has been suspended pending an administrative investigation - She and Thurston regularly exchanged funds and she believes LL are checking if she has unwittingly received funds Thurston obtained by fraud. I will try to find out Mystik's reactions to the review process once she's heard the results of it and report them here.
[UPDATE] There is now a rather lacking in detail statement on WSE's website. It confirms that someone managed to take out money, but gives no details about names, amounts etc. It also says that the new code deployed is much safer than the code it is replacing, and includes the Linden Lab Risk API which monitors transactions to try to catch fraudulent L$ changing hands.
1. Fools from the beginning, no doubt about that.
That now I see it got hacked easily... I won't be making any future plan with them, no matter how much they update/upgrade their system.
Posted at 8:35PM on Jul 24th 2007 by Nacon